Jhumpa Lahiri

Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed.

A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling that I didn't fully belong, that my parents didn't belong.

He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.

American? Indian? I don't know what these words mean. In Italy, it is all about blood, family, where you come from. I'm asked where I am from. I'm from nowhere; I always was, but now I am happy knowing it.

Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.

I've always had this feeling wherever I go. Of not feeling fully part of things, not fully accepted, not fully inside of something.

Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.

I have two passports because I have to have at least one, and I really don't know how I define myself. And I feel that as I get older, I feel very fortunate to have, on paper, a dual nationality.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment.

Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

I was always aware of what the language I was using meant in terms of my bond with my parents - how it defined the lines of affection between us. When I spoke English, I felt I wasn't completely their child any more but the child of another language.

Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.

It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city.

I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of thought - the freedom to explore and move in unexpected ways.

I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment.

I started writing after college, slowly, secretly writing.